Confessions and Blessings

Sister Eisert discovered the child lock in our car and finds it hilarious when I get locked in. That's okay though because Sister Beach always saves me! Plus I can reach sister Eisert from the back seat when a slug bug drives by way easier than she can reach me from the front seat.

So, as many of you know, I have gone completely off of dairy because of allergies. I get the most hilarious questions about it all the time because people want to make sure that when they feed me I don't die at their homes (my allergy is not terribly serious). My favorite and most common question that I get is, "So, can you have eggs?" This questions cracks me up ever time, and I get it at LEAST once a week. last I checked, eggs come from a chicken, and dairy comes from a cow... I don't tell that to them though, I just say, "yes, I can have eggs."

Our apartment has a tradition that we call Confession Friday. it stems from a tradition that my family has back at home. The rules are that you get to confess anything that you want, and you're not allowed to get in trouble for it. The confessions are always so funny! This last week when we went around the room with all of our sisters we laughed and laughed at all of the confessions. then it got to my turn. I confessed that 3 days after I made my new years resolution of no dairy I relapsed. That night when no one was looking I stuffed about 5 cookies full of milk and butter in my mouth as fast as I could, and enjoyed every moment of it. Part of the reason I have gone off of dairy so strictly is to support those of our investigators who have to quite smoking, drinking, etc. in order to be baptized. So whenever I eat dairy it is just as if I have relapsed. Haha, my companions like to keep track of the time since my last relapse.

Last night we dropped one of our investigators. It was heart wrenching!  I love that girl so much. When we first started meeting with her she had such a light about her. She would read the book of Mormon, pray, receive answers to her prayers, experience miracles, and attend sacrament meeting. The windows of heaven were truly opening up to her. But something changed. She stopped reading, praying, and coming to church. She started denying the miracles that she saw, and that brightness that we felt when we were around her turned to darkness. It broke my heart. last night as I prayed for her I felt a warm assurance that Heavenly Father placed my companions and I into her life to get her started on the right path back to Him. She may not be willing to accept it now, but one day she will remember the sweet and tender feelings of the Holy Ghost that she felt as we taught her. Letting her go was so hard, but we knew it was the right thing to do. There are people waiting for us to share the message of the gospel with them, who are ripe and ready, but we will miss them if we spend all of our time on people who are not ripe and searching earnestly. I am grateful for these lessons.

We experienced several incredible lessons this week too. There is a girl we are teaching who is SOOO close to baptism we can almost taste it I'll call her Sally. Last week we finished all the lessons with her, and are now working towards helping her to make that next leap of faith. She wants to be baptized but won't commit because she is scared that her parents will be upset. We decided to invite a member along with us to our last lesson who is a convert of 2 years. During the lesson she felt inspired to share with Sally a little bit of her conversion story. The spirit entered the room so strong as she explained how she was in almost the same position before getting baptized, but she knew that she had come to a point where she couldn't learn any more about the gospel without first being baptized. She invited Sally to pick a day like she did when she could sit her family down, explain to them how much the decision meant to her, and then to pray about a date when she could be ready for baptism. It was such a powerful moment. Sally said she would pray about a day to do these things and would let us know on Wednesday. I can hardly wait for Wednesday to come!

We had another moment this week with some other investigators that we thought we were going to loose. We invited our ward mission leader to come with us to the lesson and prayed pretty fervently that the Lord would guide the lesson. Somehow we were able to get to the bottom of things to discover that they had a real problem with the priesthood and the Book of Mormon. As we read about the functions of the priesthood in the bible, one of our investigators stopped us and said well with your "priesthood" can you actually do all of these things that the bible says? We looked at our ward mission leader, Chad, and said "well actually, Chad holds that very priesthood, why don't you ask him?" They were a little bit taken back, but Chad was able to share the most powerful testimony on the priesthood. I was then able to testify of the blessing it has been in my life, and shared a personal first hand experience when it blessed my life. You could tell our investigators hearts had been touched. They were almost speechless. I know the work we do, and the things that we teach are of God. I know that I have been called by a prophet of God to facilitate an environment where the spirit can teach. God is with His missionaries.

Moment of the Week:
Yesterday one of our investigators surprised us by coming to church for the first time. We didn't expect to see him at all. He walked in with 4 other friends just as the meeting was starting and whispered, "I hope you don't mind that I brought some friends with me." We chuckled to ourselves thinking, HECK NO TECHNO WE DON'T MIND!! And quietly whispered back, "yeah, that's just fine."

:)

Love,
Sister Carter

We all decided to get dressed up for valentines day.

Seriously this town is infested with Wild Turkey's. Dinner anyone?